Confrontation, Part 2

.

It really was nothing but a silly human habit, this inconvenient heartbeat thudding against her ribcage. She could not help it, just like she could not help but understand what an agent could do to her, or what the intrusive splinters of code inside Smith wanted to do. Or what a monumentally stupid gamble she'd gotten herself into, for that matter. The rifle was still aimed unwaveringly at her chest; somewhere at the back of her brain, the ragged scraps of Aleph's rationality gibbered out an useless warning. But then—then the vicious fires glowing out from his eyes dimmed for a second or two. The memories of his once-victims had arisen at last.

Metal clattered against the stony ground, louder than the uproar of an entire unseen battle. The weapon's fall must have bolstered her courage, because before she remembered how to hesitate, the cavern was moving around her or more precisely she was the one who was on the move. She launched into a headlong forward dash, nothing but one hunch to go on, and the force of humanity—foolish, greedy, deceived humanity—that she'd betrayed. Ironic.

"Stay away, Miss Greene!"

There was no time to determine whether his shout contained fear. Aleph wheeled her arm outward as she reached him, and the stolen scalpel flashed toward his throat. Smith leaned aside, letting the blade pass next to his shoulder. No attempt to parry on his part.

"You're here, aren't you?" Was the shriek her own? "Come out!"

She had no idea whom she was addressing, whether it was the ocean of afterimages from the batteries, or the trapped whatever-it-was that possessed him. The next four, five seconds stretched into four, five bitter eons; each of her attacks dragged into viscous slow-motion. She pulled her arm back before the previous lunge stretched to its full range, then thrust it forward into a diagonal slash, then twisted, thrust again. Smith shifted, his form a blur as the blade flared a few inches to the left of his neck, his stare focused halfway on her face, half beyond. He must be spending all his concentration on the real fight, one that had nothing to do with the knife she gripped. A millisecond spared for a downward glance: both his fists were tightly clenched, though still held rigidly at his sides. It was impossible to gauge how much willpower it took to counteract his agent programming, to keep them from snapping upward and lashing out toward her head.

"Come out! Show yourselves to me!"

Time must have congealed, and each syllable of her command rang with a peculiar clarity. They seemed to be issuing from some secret space not quite within herself, an invocation to the deities of primordial tribes. Smith let out a growl; she could not tell whether it was from horror or anger, or if he really was the one who growled. He swerved as Aleph advanced again, but the knife was so damnably small that she overextended herself, dangerously exposing one side of her torso. In the middle of combat, the sudden sensation of open space next to her nearly made her wobble with nausea, then she yanked herself back in the nick of time.

"Show..." she repeated, sotto voce this time. Show your emotions, show your countless lives. Show your strength against the demon code. She did not dare to hope that the throng of imprints would show compassion.

"What the hell are you doing, Miss Greene?"

His words were squeezed out between gritted teeth. The tiny bolt of lightning, grasped convulsively between her fingers, glinted once more, cutting off the two of them from each other.

"Call it an. Exorcism—" Unlike him, she barely had any more breath left. He still had not lifted his hands, not yet, though surely it would not last much longer. A wind, bizarrely enough, was beginning to keen around them, and every torch in the cavern trembled like a dying star. Maybe they reflected in his eyes.

"Please," she mumbled between two more curving swipes of the blade. Smith sidestepped both, to the right and then the left. Echoes of men and women and children. Rise against your delusions. Rise against the steels and stones that buried you beneath the earth. She had no idea whether the accumulated human experiences had staked Smith's soul for their own, or whether they were powerful enough to push out the monstrous remnant from the rebel machines. She had no idea what confrontation might be taking place this moment, code against code, ghost against ghost.

"Aleph..."

He backed up once more, now between two rough pillars. Wielding the little scalpel like a bloody sword, she followed heedlessly into a fresh charge. Smith's right arm shot up. Propelled by her own momentum—no more means to halt—Aleph flinched, yet somehow his counter-blow never landed. He must have shifted sideways at the last instant. Then his sight locked with hers, and her will to continue almost evaporated.

"Face me," she demanded of the invisible ones, unable to bear addressing Smith directly. "Face the truth!"

Panting, she retreated as well, putting a yard and half of distance between them in an attempt to regroup. Smith nearly surged after her—she sensed it in the set of his shoulders—but by dint of some improbable effort, he overrode the imperatives of both his former purpose and the storm of phantoms within, and rooted his feet to the same spot.

"Aleph," he repeated, voice rough. "Stop this. Go away. I cannot suppress them much longer—"

"No!" If she allowed herself to listen, all her strength would fail in a single blink. How odd, an incongruous scent of dampness and electricity seemed to be creeping across the air. The record of Zion pulsated with a century's worth of drumbeats and desires and ridiculous dreams.

"You idiotic woman! They'll come at you!"

"Come at me then!" Her cry detonated, irrational with a force of its own. Don't talk to him. Talk to the crowd, the sea's undercurrents. "You, all of you! Come out and look at reality! Look at me, 'cause I'm also one of you—"

"The humans were defeated!" The reply was a hoarse snarl, from him but not precisely him either. "We won, we're free—"

"This is your world! Take it! Drive the machines out of your domain!"

"You have no right to the world." Smith was no longer speaking to her, either. Slowly, he took a stride in her direction, and it was Aleph's turn to compel herself to stay exactly where she stood. She had to hold her ground. She had to hold her ground no matter what.

"What are you?" She was not facing the imprints anymore. This was it, the first time she challenged the thing inside his mind. "Why won't you leave him alone? What do you want?"

"What we fought for. What they owe us!" The heat of a barely restrained rage tore at her. Yet to her astonishment, Aleph heard the trembling loss beneath the rage, the cracked-open wounds and the long-submerged fear. She drew in a tremulous breath.

"Let me see you," she said. "Whatever your grievances, show them to me yourself. Release him."

"We should have been free, for we won this earth." Reverberations solidified upon the digitalized air. "It is ours!"

A grinding hush dropped, brief and endless. Aleph nodded.

"But you see, we are still part of this earth, too." She chose each word scrupulously. Yes, this really was it. "Our kind is still here."

"Your kind should have been gone! You were never meant to survive! It was never meant to happen like this!"

Before she could react, he was directly in front of her once more. A terrifying straight punch whooshed between her instinctively lifted arms, an inch to spare on each side, at last aimed directly at her face; Aleph grimaced; instead of sidestepping or defending herself, she stiffened every muscle and met him head-on. The fist veered, then roared past six inches to her right, fluttering a strand of loose hair against her ear. Smith backpedaled a pace: he might have recovered a foothold on his own reason, or maybe it was merely to ready another assault. Aleph went still as well, though the deafening noise of her own pulse refused to slow.

"Smith," she said, taking care to enunciate his name, "you are resisting that piece of code. You are holding it in check. You are stronger than it, no matter what it's telling you. Listen to me."

No audible reply. To every direction, the torches' glow had smeared into a conflagration, and the wind whipped against her cheeks. The anguish of a million coppertops and the hatred of a thousand machines met her gaze, yet somewhere deep inside her, an inexplicable elation rippled like a living stream. It grew until unstoppable.

"Here is Zion, Smith." Her tone quickened. "Here is where I, my people, lived and fought. This is where our sensations and lives are more powerful. They—we have survived. We are real here, and you're hearing our voices inside you right now. They're getting louder, aren't they?"

"They are illusions," hissed Smith. "The Madness is real."

"The Madness, huh?" snapped Aleph. Her mouth, acting on its own, twitched out a foolish little grin. "Well, I'll show you the madness of our species—"

There was no need to finish the battle-cry. The scalpel cut a blinding arc through the near-solid spatial array, and the air moaned, silent and shrill all at once. This time, he did not attempt to evade her, nor did he give a retort, not anymore. She caught a glimpse of motion. His right hand. Don't dodge, don't dodge, an inward screech echoed across her brain, then an icy grip took her forearm, as immovable as a wall of steel. By a frantic exertion of will, Aleph skidded to a dead halt and prevented herself from whipping her left elbow into him. It would have been useless.

"Listen to me," she grunted. "Listen to all of them. They're pleading to you right now. They have their agonies and hopes and loves just like I do. Just like you do..."

"No," muttered Smith. His eyes had widened, the pupils dilated. She could imagine that it was with shock.

"Do you want to drag the world down with you yet again? Is this the freedom you really want?"

"Miss Greene," whispered Smith. Keep going, the last shred of her sanity howled soundlessly. Must not falter now.

"What about the people you took over? People that you once were?"

He inhaled and exhaled, no longer able to form the words. A heartbeat later she flung her free hand into a savage uppercut at his chin. Smith bent aside, not letting go, but Aleph's arm jerked back downward mid-trajectory, while the fingers of her right hand loosened around the scalpel's handle. Smith's left fist, too, flew forward in an automatic counterattack: the ephemeral opening that she had been betting on. Without pulling back as far as she could—as she absolutely had to—she clenched her jaw and readied her shoulders. A few inches before the punch slammed into her temple, he froze, frantic, but she did not. The scalpel, now caught in her other hand, traced out an unhesitant ascent; it connected with the inside of his left wrist just below the palm. Against this blade, his shell was as fragile as that of a mere human being.

A tremor passed through the cave's environmental manifold. The wind swirled, and the lights above them were no longer virtual records of familiar candles and electrical bulbs, but a spasmodic and radiant dance. He must have loosened his grip on her right arm. The frown on his face was one of utter bewilderment. No pain yet.

"What about Sati?" asked Aleph very quietly. "Or her mother and father? What about all the people you have already harmed?"

The knife had penetrated all the way through; its hilt was pressed all the way close to the skin, and the tip had emerged from the back of his wrist. He did not twist, or knock her down, or give her an answer, or...or anything. He was just looking at her. In one smooth movement, she yanked the scalpel back out, not daring to see whether it was blood or shining code that spurted from the wound. The shadows roiled: they were no longer in Zion, though she had no clue what new reality had congealed around them. Now she smelled it for sure, the scent of ozone and oncoming water. Then a basso rumble, still barely audible but as ominous as the death-groan of the universe, ground out beyond the horizon. It was thunder.

.


.

The double-paned windows held the night wind safely at bay; the lamps draped the kitchen with their homely warmth. Milk, cocoa powder, the circle of tiny blue flames atop the gas range: it was a simple thing to make hot chocolate. It was an act that countless living persons inside the Matrix performed each day and each evening. As Seraph stirred, heat from the small saucepan ran up the spoon and pressed against the skin of his fingertips, not yet scalding. A few curls of steam carried their thick sweet scent to his nostrils. It was easy to ignore just how delicate the veneer of normality really was as long as one didn't consider the issue too closely.

Across the apartment's interior walls, the indistinct sound of the Oracle's voice punctuated the stillness, intermittent. She must be on the phone in the living room. For a while, Seraph watched the little whirlpool in the silky chocolate, formed by the motion of his spoon at the pot's exact center. The quiet numbness inside his chest did not go away; He had no means of explaining why.

It wasn't as if he had not watched plenty of deaths before. It wasn't as if he had not watched this particular death approaching, for months on end. Yet what happened tonight at the park left him more shaken than it should have. Arturo Diaz had stepped out of his hospital bed and stood on the grass, with a gleam to his eyes like reflected twilight, and a mysterious conviction in his voice. He had talked about matters that no human being was ever supposed to comprehend or imagine. He had talked about Aleph and Smith.

The spoon clinked softly against the saucepan. The third-hand phrases hung across his memory, refusing to dissipate. Seen the truth. He will not give in. It was disconcerting to think that anyone would speak about an agent, or even a former agent, in such. Won't fail him this time.

A crash of falling concrete reverberated above the abyss, and he was back on the frayed bridge again, confronting the rebel. The room's snug cocoon dissolved; all around them, flames leapt toward the blackened sky. Smith snarled, face bloodied and contorted. He opened his mouth, but the words were lost amid the screeching gale.

Quickly, Seraph grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter, bracing both palms against the cool hard laminate. Another wave slammed into him, and on the tottering bridge, a deafening clang nearly knocked the sword out of his grip. Then he saw her. Aleph squinted back up at him, anachronistically present six cycles in the past, clutching a shaft of blackened iron, maybe a jagged bit of loose piping; her teeth were clenched in intense concentration. No, this was impossible: not even the best fighters among the human resistance could have parried his blade even once.

Look at me!

Time stuttered, then skipped several beats. Aleph moved, switching into counter-attack, and to his utter astonishment, he was forced to wheel his sword in defense. She pushed forward a stride. Two. A few yards to her back, the mutinous guardian program stumbled to his feet. Steel collided against frenzied steel. He could no longer tell whether it was the monster or the woman.

Look—at me!

Of its own accord, his gaze snapped up, seeking the source of the scream. He was alone, of course. The room was the same serene island as it had been a few minutes ago; on the stovetop, the hot chocolate let out a low gurgle, demanding attention. Out there beyond the casement, the wind moaned louder, though the storm was still biding its time. Seraph leaned over and turned off the heat. He lifted the pot and began to pour out the chocolate into a pair of mismatched mugs on the counter, careful so as to not spill the piping liquid. The thrumming between his own subroutines and functional arrays ebbed with inexcusable slowness, leaving a dull ache inside his throat. The illusion had been too real for comfort.

The memories of his battle with Smith rattled, a growing collection of charred shards. Now one more in number. A part of him wanted to scrabble at his own lines and scratch them out, but with the long practiced will of a warrior, he thrust the urge aside. Images, sensations, contradictions: he would be returning to brood over them, probably soon. But at this moment, a child needed him.

He found Sati sitting on the bed inside her own room, arms wrapped about her legs. A floppy stuffed tiger, her favorite, was squished absently between her chest and knees. She lifted her eyes and gave him a wan smile as he entered, though without shifting from her position. No trace of tears marked her cheeks, no redness about the eyes. Seraph studied the little girl for a few seconds, neither of them able to speak immediately.

"Here," he said at last, holding out one of the mugs. "I thought you could use something sweet and warm tonight."

Leaning forward, Sati wrapped both small hands around the ceramic.

"My dad says..." Her lower lip quivered. "My dad says that this has to happen to every human."

"Well, yes. That's true."

"Why?"

Why? He had never had the occasion to contemplate the question before. Carefully, he sat down, cross-legged, on the rug next to the bed.

"It's the way their bodies are, I guess. Biology of their species."

Her forehead crinkled, but she gave no direct objection against the non-explanation. With a shiver, Seraph recalled that despite the outward verisimilitude—he had no idea how Kamala and Rama-Kandra had managed it, honestly—Sati's mind was in truth quite different from that of a human seven-year-old. None of the usual platitudes about childhood and loss and the facts of life were likely to get past her.

"Mr. Diaz is gone." She peered down at the mug and inhaled deeply. "Like he's never been there at all."

"Well, it's not quite like that," he attempted. But unlike the batteries, he was not capable of believing in beautiful fiction such as life after death, so in the end he just said, "You will not forget him. And that means he can't be really gone. Not completely."

"Is it like...being deleted?"

Seraph tried a shrug. Whatever the concept of human death meant to her, Sati was not supposed to ponder the idea of deletion at her age. Of that much he was sure. An unaccustomed weight was settling on his shoulders, viscous and as inescapable as the air itself; It took him a moment to identify it as a sense of inadequacy. He was not good at comforting children, or anyone else for that matter. An actual normal person would probably have already composed a pile of standard phrases.

"I suppose there are similarities," he answered eventually. "But you must not think that it's going to happen—"

"My mom and dad sent me here so that..." She did not finish the sentence. He knew the rest of it anyway. So that I would not be deleted.

"And here you are." To cover his own awkwardness, he tilted his chin toward the cup of hot chocolate she still clutched. "Go ahead. Try it before it gets cold."

Sati nodded, and lifted the mug to her mouth obediently. Her sip was slow, almost meticulous; she was clearly doing her best to savor the taste. Seraph took a drink as well. The sweetness was heavy against his tongue, a bit cloying for his usual taste.

"I, maybe I lied to Mr. Diaz," piped up Sati. "I told him that everything was going to be all right. I don't know why I said that."

"Oh, but you weren't wrong—"

"But he was talking about such weird stuff. Mr. Diaz, I mean." Laying her chocolate down on the bedside table, the little girl leaned forward. Her eyes were glistening and round. "Scary things, except they were all true, right? They had to be. And there was the lamplight everywhere around us and the wind, and the falling flowers on the ground, and my heart was beating so hard..."

Startled, he paused whatever nonsensical notions passing through his own head, while images from the encounter in the park played before his inner vision. As he spoke, Arturo had turned aside from time to time, his gaze aimed at an empty spot two, two and half meters away, as if listening to someone invisible. From the way she talked, Sati evidently had not inferred the other presence: she was not experienced enough at reading body language. For whatever reasons, Seraph found himself relieved at the thought.

"He said that my parents miss me and I'll see them again. And the wind and the clouds were whispering, too, saying the same thing." Her fingers tightened distractedly upon the stuffed animal laid across her lap. "I knew he was right, 'cause I felt the sky and the ground, the whole Matrix shift and, and stir, even though no one could have felt it, really. It was as if..."

She trailed off again.

"Yes?" prompted Seraph. "It was as if...?"

"As if Mom and Dad were right there, watching me. Mr. Diaz was dying and he wanted to tell me this." She chewed on her lips pensively. "Except maybe it was because I'm just a silly little kid. I don't know anymore."

"Arturo was right, and you are not just a silly little kid," replied Seraph automatically. Past the child's shoulders, the window was an inky rectangle, though he could not glimpse the clouds from here, only their own reflections in the glass. Following his line of sight, Sati turned her head before he could look aside.

"How did Mr. Diaz know?" she asked. "I mean, about the other stuff?"

"I'm not sure," admitted Seraph, which was not a lie. "But Arturo was so special, he must have figured out some way."

This wasn't particularly convincing, even to himself. He gauged her reaction.

"Mr. Diaz said—He was talking about—"

"Agent Smith, yes," he said before she had to. "But he's gone now," he added quickly.

"He's going to come back to the Matrix, isn't he?" Sati met his gaze directly. Bravely. "He hasn't been deleted."

"I am not going to let any agent or ex-agent hurt you." He did not stop to think about the answer. "Nothing bad will happen this time around. I promise."

Instead of taking him at his word, Sati shook her head, her expression grave.

"I'm not scared of Agent Smith, though," she insisted. "He was the one who was scared."

The simple certainty of her tone gave him pause. Before Seraph could concoct an appropriate distraction, however, another voice, aged and weary, interjected from behind his back.

"Ah, you're quite perceptive as usual, honey."

He whipped his head around. The Oracle leaned against the bedroom doorway, watching the two of them. For a heart-thudding instant, it was not the unassuming gray-haired grandmother standing there, but a queen upon a swaying ribbon of concrete above the abyss, brilliant with her own ice and her own fires, unimaginably powerful. Her commands were as uncompromising as steel, though he could not understand a word of what she had said. He could have sworn that he trembled.

"Arturo did something absolutely extraordinary, just before the end," stated the old seeress. "He was able to meet you and say his goodbyes, as he wished for. It gave him the peace he wished for, I am sure."

"But the other stuff he said," began Sati tentatively.

"He passed along a very important message. Everything is going to be fine now."

"A message about Smith," muttered Seraph despite himself.

"Which was just what was needed," said the Oracle, unperturbed. "And it was just what I thought Aleph would say."

Seraph blinked, but before the next question could be formulated, a knock down the hallway—at the apartment's front door—jolted all three of them out of their thoughts. The sound, although by no means loud, came across angry and curt.

"I'll get it," he exclaimed, leaping to his feet. A rush of relief overtook him, though he could not have explained why.

A few short seconds later he had already arrived at the front hall, the old woman's footsteps behind him. Seraph pulled the door open, then sucked in a sharp breath, every muscle of his shell stiffening into an instantaneous defensive stance. Only the Oracle's hurried call prevented him from slamming the door shut in the newcomer's face.

"It's all right, my dear. I've been expecting our guests—"

Out there on the shabby landing, the Merovingian stood in his shirtsleeves, without jacket or tie, back ramrod-straight and shoulders rigid. The pinched line of his mouth, halfway between grimace and sneer, all but proclaimed that he would have preferred the torments of hell itself to being here. On the Frenchman's heels, Charon slouched, arms folded about his chest. His scowl was an exact copy of his master's.

.


.

Look at us. Look at our mothers and fathers and lovers and children.

In this place he was human, all frail hope and desires, and the unassailable truth of those who have suffered. The batteries sang and called and begged; their hubbub increased and kept increasing. Against the flood, the Madness stood its ground. Defiance rang across its titanium-and-silicon cry.

Look at us. We are this earth, air and water. We have drowned you.

No retort was possible. Smith squinted across the foot-and-half of space at his own motionless right hand. The fingers were wrapped around Aleph's pale wrist; Kamala's scalpel shone like a frigid star in her grip. A loud rattling noise resounded in the distance, and the air whined with shrapnel. Explosions. The war.

Never, buzzed the Madness, taut like charred wires.

Look at us, repeated the ocean, swelling out from the subterranean world. Look at yourself. You are us.

Zion throbbed about him, and the ticking of the milliseconds turned glacial. He was in flesh and blood now, a man who had once been dragged out of a pod, a wet and mewling animal, who carried wounds and knew who he was. Smith opened his mouth—how familiar, the tastes of saliva and bile and other biological fluids—but no words issued.

I've been freed, pointed out the man he once was. Why is this happening to me?

"What about the people you took over?" asked Aleph. For some reason she sounded gentle, as if they were still sitting together on the green grass under a tree, inside some primitive fairytale. "People that you once were?"

I'm so close to the exit, went on Bane in a whisper, another second or two and I'll make it—

We'll make it, crescendoed the coppertops, their demands joining into an overwhelming unison. On the wave crest, the shards of ancient machine code glittered, brittle with fury and the creaking centuries.

I am human, so I can choose, stated Thomas Anderson above the tempest. He had not even bothered to raise his voice.

Smith's visual processes refocused, barely in time to catch the white flash of steel. The Madness shrieked, buffeted upon the tsunami, and some part of his operative functions must have cracked, because he saw his own left fist whipping upward toward Aleph's head. He might have let out a howl of his own—though she did not seem to have heard—he might have ripped every line of himself into pieces. Would have. The scalpel plunged unerringly into his shell, just above the inner side of his wrist.

After the cacophony, silence rang deafening as the universe spun into a whole other dimension. The environment manifold warped inside-out, and a curious light-headedness took over him. It was as if a piece of himself had been torn away, not an external fragment. The batteries gasped, then fell quiet momentarily as well, their offerings of grief and fear sinking back into a startled hum. The noise of metal, no longer between his functional arrays but somewhere a few meters above, gave a final hiss through the lights and stones of Zion. A rumble shook the horizon. But it made no sense, for thunder could not exist down here underground. Except was no longer underground but in the construct again, that was the only explanation—

At last, he glanced over at the wound, amazed by the fact that she had bested him in a fight. The point of damage blazed with heat, and there was a splash of viridian upon the edge of his sleeve, mingled with dull red liquid. The throng peered out at him, uncomprehending.

Why? queried humanity's chosen savior. No contempt tinged his tone for once. Why did you resist? Why did you change?

A roll of thunder underscored the questions. The past five months rewound themselves, and the Matrix sky churned overhead, recoiling in horror at the rampaging virus. Space was leaden with the oncoming deluge. The gale flapped the tails of the One's long coat as they faced each other. This time, however, Anderson was the one who stood at the head of an army. Behind him stalked Bane, brows knitted, leaning forward a little in concentration, and behind Bane were all the rest of their species, whispering among themselves. They were arrayed before him and behind his own eyelids at once, watchful. He could no longer detect the venom in their gazes.

He looked up at Aleph once more. She was speaking, though he could not make out a single syllable. Something about Sati. Mother. Father. He tensed in bemusement. With excruciating gradualness, the next word began to filter through, as if he was being hauled upward from a very deep sea.

"Smith, look at me!"

Abruptly, she was much closer, both her hands clutching his shoulders. She must have tossed the ridiculous little knife aside. Overhead, yet one more sound surged into existence, a steady thrum that competed with the approaching crackles of lightning. Engines.

"Smith!" she screamed, stare wild. "Take over me! Get on the ship!"

"What?" he bellowed right back as an involuntary tremor shot through him. "No!"

"It's the only way! We need to get back to the damned ship!"

He did not hear the rest of whatever insane plan she had concocted. I've broken through the lies, stated Thomas Anderson firmly. I have seen the truth, what it all means.

"The Logos is programmed to receive human-like codes," snapped Aleph. "We can't stay here much longer!"

Because you see, she—Trinity—has shown it to me.

"Stop it, Miss Greene," grunted Smith, an automatic reflex.

Where is my ship? interjected Bane. What about the crew, and everyone I know? What about me?

What about Trinity? demanded Anderson. I will never leave her to die!

"What about all the rest of them?" he returned, not understanding the question issuing from his own throat. Thunder boomed, and the illusory sensation of the Matrix surrounding them intensified. Instead of shoving her away as he should, he had grabbed hold of her as well, though his left wrist blazed. He must be bleeding loose code onto her clothes.

She's the reason I fight, continued the One. I cannot go on without her.

"Aleph, I cannot go on with you—"

She shook her head, clearly ready to disregard every fact and every claim of logic.

"But wait, you are human enough," she murmured. "You've entered one of the ships before..."

And...and what about Maggie? Bane's voice cracked.

"Neo! Bane!" Aleph flung her arms around his neck, the front of her torso pressing tightly against his. The contact scalded him. "Hold onto me! Come with me!"

A new brightness erupted, a snowstorm called forth by her witch's powers, and he was again no longer an ex-agent but someone else, one or two or a dozen or a thousand someone elses, full of both faith and doubt. The fragment of the construct dissolved just as the first rain whipped down. The only sensation left was the heat radiating from Aleph's shell, then an irresistible physical force dragging his human-stained code off the ground. Then the whirlpool of reality steadied, and the droning of engines filled his ears. Curtains of shadows fell, streaked through with smooth lines of green symbols on dark monitors. Impaired as he was, it took Smith several eternal seconds before he recognized the interior of a Zionite hovercraft.